The Troubled Air (51 page)

This time the applause was spontaneous and full. Lewis looked over the meeting, somberly gratified, allowing the applause to run itself out.

“They need us,” he declared loudly, as if he were shouting to comrades on a barricade. “They won’t be able to stay on the air half an hour without us. Let’s give them a taste of how powerful we can be, united and unafraid, when we’re challenged, and I guarantee you that one month from today there will not be a single murmur about political blacklists. And to show you that I am in earnest and not just making a gesture, I hereby pledge five hundred dollars to a strike fund, if it comes to that, or any other fund that is necessary. And I also pledge that I will not take any offer, no matter how promising, from any agency or network against which there is any suspicion of blacklisting.”

There was a great deal of applause at this, and from various portions of the room, voices called out, “I pledge a hundred,” and, “I pledge fifty.” Archer watched curiously, recognizing rehearsal, and wondered what Burke, as chairman of the meeting, was going to do to handle the cleverly stage-managed stampede.

Lewis turned and sat down, putting his glasses in his pocket and tapping his little white cards neatly against the palm of his hand, for use, perhaps at other meetings.

Burke walked slowly to the lectern. His face was white and angry and he was making an obvious effort to control himself with parliamentary dignity.

“Thank you, Mr. Lewis,” he said coldly, when the commotion had subsided, “for your views. If you don’t mind, I’d like to reserve motions like that for the end of the meeting, when all the speakers have been heard from and there has been a chance for discussion from the floor.”

Lewis shrugged, suggesting wearily that he had been prepared for just such cowardly hedging, but he didn’t protest.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Burke said to the audience, “I am not going to try to defend the next speaker, as he is known to most of you, and should need no defense.” He waited, but there was no demonstration of any kind from the audience. “Mr. Clement Archer.”

Burke’s eyes were glittering as he shook Archer’s hand ostentatiously.

Archer looked out over the room. The faces seemed blurred by hostility. Is it possible, he thought dully, that all these years, while I have worked with these people and traveled among them, they have been secretly hating me? Far off at the back of the room, Kitty’s face was a pale, withdrawn triangle.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Archer said. His throat was dry and his lips were twitching and it was difficult to speak. “I had a speech prepared for tonight, but …”

There was a noise from the back of the room and Archer stopped, puzzled, until he realized that people were calling, “Louder. Louder. We can’t hear you.”

“I said that I had a speech prepared,” Archer said, more clearly, “but I’m not going to make it. Everybody here seems to have a definite plan about what to do. I don’t. I’m groping. I’m not certain about how to proceed. I’m not certain even that anything we decide on here tonight,” he said, speaking more strongly now, “and anything we do after tonight will be of any value. I’m in doubt and maybe you don’t want to hear at this time from doubters. But I’m sure about one or two things and I’ll tell you what they are first. First of all, I want to tell you what I know about the people on my program who are under attack. Manfred Pokorny, Alice Weller, Stanley Atlas, Frances Motherwell, and Victor Herres.” As he spoke the names it seemed to Archer that he had been involved with them all his life, as though he were the prisoner of those names and he would never escape them. “Since they are all artists—” (Was a past tense necessary for Pokorny and would anyone check him on this?) “—the most important information about them concerns the quality of their work. And here I am on firm ground. I have worked with all of them over a period of years and I can say, unhesitatingly, that their work was good, and in some cases brilliant.” (Alice. Was he being absolutely candid about Alice and could he be challenged on that?) “As a man who is responsible for putting on a show every week, I naturally prefer to be able to choose performers, if only on the grounds of convenience, without having to inquire into anything but their talent. Until now, in this country at least, that has been the only basis on which artists have been judged and I am sure we are the better for it. Some of the greatest works of art have been produced by some of the greatest scoundrels of history. Artists in general are not the most stable citizens of any society and their behavior often does not conform to the accepted legal and moral codes of their times. Still, I hear no one campaigning to have the Sistine Chapel whitewashed because of the rumors about Michelangelo’s sexual behavior and there is no movement on foot to have Francois Villon’s poems burned because he wound up on the scaffold as a common thief. Nor are Dostoyevsky’s novels attacked because he confessed to raping a ten-year-old girl.” Archer closed his eyes momentarily and remembered the yellow pages on which he had written that afternoon, and remembered Kitty tearing them clumsily, with her bandaged hand, and shouting, “Artists! God, you make me laugh with your artists!” He wondered what Kitty was thinking now, listening to him in the back of the room. “Are we to be stricter with our contemporaries,” he asked, “merely because they are alive? Will it be a good bargain to shut down on future Dostoyevskys and Villons in exchange for political conformity? I know it must sound grandiose to use names like that in addressing a meeting of people who write and act in soap operas and televised vaudeville performances. But the principle is the same and I’m afraid it’s indivisible. By accident, or by clever design, the dwarfs in the company of art are being forced to do the fighting to save the giants.”

Archer was aware of hurt, angry, vain faces staring up at him at this unpleasant description, but he went on stubbornly, feeling himself grow less and less nervous. “It doesn’t make it any easier,” he said, “that among the people we have to defend are those who would mercilessly shut down any voice of which they did not approve, and who have, in a large measure, provoked this action against us and who have supplied ammunition and techniques to the censors and book-burners and who have done as much as anyone else to create the atmosphere in this country which tolerates repression. Many of you, I know, do not believe this and despise me for saying it. I myself did not believe it for a long time and I have to force myself to believe it now, because it makes me face up to a despairing, quarrelsome and perhaps violent future. Many of you think of yourselves as innocent and persecuted. Persecuted you may be, but you are not innocent.”

Ostentatiously, a woman in a large-brimmed black hat stood up in the middle of the room, put on her fur coat and walked down the middle aisle toward the door, her heels making a loud tapping in the still room. Archer waited until she went out. Then he went on. “It may seem strange to you,” he said, “that a man like me, who is himself under attack, chooses to speak like this. From the material that has been published about me I see that a fairly good case could be made out for those gentlemen who prefer to call me a fellow-traveler. In the 1930s and during the war years, I joined several organizations and supported several causes which were also supported by the Communists. At the risk of damaging myself even more than I have up till now, I am going to confess that I knew perfectly well that I was allying myself at that time with them. But naively, or accurately, I believed that it was not I who was traveling with them, but they who were traveling with me. Today that does not seem terribly intelligent, but try to remember the different climate of that time, when Nazism was on the march, when there was no talk of world revolution or Russian aggression, when our Government not only tolerated but encouraged collaboration with Communism all over the world. What’s more, I make no apologies for what I did and thought in those days, and I suspect the rectitude of the men who would punish me now for those long-ago thoughts and actions. No matter how many lists are published, I refuse to believe that attempting to save the republican Government of Spain, for example, from Franco and Mussolini and Hitler was a subversive act or contrary to the best interests of the American people. And no matter what happens in the future I will never be convinced that sending old clothes or penicillin to Russia at the time of Stalingrad was anything but necessary and sensible behavior.”

There was applause somewhere in the room, the first overt reaction since he had started speaking. The applause caught on and spread over the room. Archer stared soberly at the audience, wondering how much of the applause was ironic or window-dressing or relief.

“Now things have changed,” Archer said. “Mr. Lewis will undoubtedly say that it is
I
who have changed, out of cowardice or a desire to be comfortable, or because I read the wrong newspapers. Others will say that the Communists have not really changed, they have only been more completely revealed. I suspect that all of these things are partially true. Still, we won’t solve the problem by imposing silence on all who oppose us or allowing ourselves to be silenced because our opinions happen to be unpopular. As matters are going now, I could not be surprised to see everyone in this room, myself included, clapped into jail within the next few years. I hope you will believe me,” Archer said, smiling for the first time, “when I tell you I do not think this country will be better off on that day. This would seem to put me in agreement with Mr. Lewis, who said that now we are all in the same boat and that we had better row together to save ourselves. Actually, we are not in a position to think of rowing at the moment. The best we can do is bail together and hope to keep afloat. When the time comes to row I have a notion Mr. Lewis and I will insist upon rowing in different directions. In talking of Mr. Burke, Mr. Lewis said that he will find himself in a concentration camp even if he says he is opposed to the Communists seven nights a week. Mr. Lewis obviously implied by that that Mr. Burke was wasting his breath and would be more useful if he kept his opinions to himself. I happen to disagree. If, along with Mr. Burke and Mr. Lewis, and whatever Communists, non-Communists, radicals, liberals and cranks are inaccurately collected in that doleful time, I am put behind wire, I will feel much better if I know I am there for my own reasons and not for anyone else’s. We are not in the same situation, regardless of how hard the Communists and their opponents try to include us. The sheriff who is caught in the same jail with a suspected murderer and who fights to defend him against a lynch mob is not of the suspect’s party. And even if the mob kills him on its way to the cell, or swings him up on the same tree they use for the alleged criminal, he must insist with his last breath on his separateness and on his difference in function … There is a reverse side to this proposition, too. At the risk of incurring Mr. Lewis’s further displeasure, I must say that I am opposed to the Communists, here and abroad. The great majority of Americans join with me in this opposition. Most of these people are, I am convinced, decent and honorable. There are some, though, the shrillest of all, who use their anti-Communism to cloak bigotry, a lust for war, an approval of dictatorship, a hatred of all liberalism, all progress, all freedom of expression. They are the lynch mob and it is as necessary for me to denounce them and disassociate myself from their principles as it is for me to disassociate myself from the principles of the accused man they are out to hang. As a law-abiding citizen, I am committed to defending the rights of the accused to a proper trial and a proper hanging if he is guilty and a proper exoneration if he is innocent. But I insist on believing that accusation is not evidence, criticism is not heresy, an advocacy of change is not treason, a search for peaceful settlement is not subversive. The courts are slowly making firm ground for us all to stand on in these matters and I will be content to abide by their decisions, even if I feel they are too strict or influenced unduly by the fearful temper of the times. We have a history in this country of righting wrongs and reversing immoral legal decisions and I refuse to be stampeded into premature punishment by cynical and disingenuous attacks on the reputations of people who may have campaigned at one time or another for the forty-hour week or the policy of flying the UN flag over public-school buildings or even for the outlawing of the atom bomb. It was just such attacks on people who worked on my program that have led me to appear here tonight. Partly out of curiosity and partly from a desire to keep a program that I had worked on for more than four years from disintegrating, I spent some time in investigating the politics of accused actors and musicians. Some spoke candidly, others properly told me to mind my own business. And regardless of my agreement or disagreement with any of them or my approval or disapproval of their politics, I came to the conclusion that none of them in their positions on University Town represented a threat to what we call the American system or had committed acts which merited punishment, especially the severe and vindictive punishment of being deprived forever of their means of livelihood.” Archer looked out over the blur of faces uncertainly. There were other things he wanted to say, but they were elusive, complicated, contradictory, and he couldn’t find words for them. He wanted to say that loyalty—loyalty to anyone or any cause should not be pushed to the extreme limits of its logical end. He wanted to say that he was baffled and that he mistrusted anyone who was not baffled. He wanted to say, Be merciful—merciful toward past malice and future errors. He wanted to warn against Lewis and his plan for a counter blacklist, first of all because it wouldn’t work, since people were not fanatics and trimmed to survive and also because there were many actors who certainly would not sacrifice themselves to salvage a known Communist’s job, even if it meant destroying their guilds in the process. And he wanted to warn against Lewis’ happy assumption of the opposition’s ugliest tactic, because regardless of their motives, they would all come out the uglier for it.

But he didn’t say any of these things. He looked out wearily at the divided faces, the faces that were set against him, the faces that seemed to approve, the waiting, balancing faces, and said, “I told you in the beginning I didn’t have a plan, that I’m groping. I’m afraid I haven’t been very helpful and many of you probably feel that I’ve been wasting your time. I think I’m clear by now about the way I feel, but I know I’m uncertain about what to do about it. I’m afraid I have to join with Mr. Lewis in saying that I don’t like any of the speeches I heard up here tonight, including his and probably including mine. I hope there will be better speeches and better plans brought forth from the floor and I shall sit down now and listen expectantly. Thank you.”